Pinterest lets employees exercise options 7 years after leaving - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/pinterest-employee-taxes/ <comment><USER3> This is really great, I hope more startups follow. In today's funding environment startups that are angling for an IPO can stay private for a very long time. Many companies are raising billions of dollars over 5-10 rounds before looking to the public markets. That can mean a long time before employees may choose to exercise their options.

Pinterest seems to recognize that if you put in two years at an early stage of the company you deserve to share in future financial success.

I wonder why they made this move now? Specifically, I wonder if it came from the executives, investors, or both?

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are a couple of must-reads if you have received ISO, NSO, RSUs: [https://equityzen.com/blog/understanding-rsus-like-your- boss...](https://equityzen.com/blog/understanding-rsus-like-your-boss/)

[https://equityzen.com/blog/understanding-equity- compensation...](https://equityzen.com/blog/understanding-equity-compensation- for-startup-employees/)

Disclaimer: I'm with EquityZen. EquityZen helps employees get liquidity for some of their options/shares before the company exits, so not only can they afford the exercise, but also finance life events.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey look, it's something Sam Altman suggested, but happening in real life

</comment><comment><USER6> Employees should start refusing to work anywhere that does it the "standard" evil way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is that a better deal than Quora's "you may exercise options within 10 years of grant date, whether or not you still work for the company"? Per [http://blog.samaltman.com/employee- equity](http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity) .

<comment><USER8> Really depends on the average tenure of the employees. In general, I think Pinterest's is better. Also, Quora only offered that to employees recently, 5 years after the company started, so any employees that left before 2014 when that was enacted wouldn't be entitled. It's possible the same is true for Pinterest though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great move and incredibly employee-friendly. We'll see if this is the beginning of other companies following suit, but I doubt it.

As has been discussed before it's not the mechanics that matter here, but rather the psychology of founders.

More often than not, there is the belief that even if you've been an employee for 2+ years, if you're not "in it for the long haul" then you don't deserve to hold on to your equity without paying for it in cash (or taking the tax hit).

Not to mention there's very little incentive to amend these policies outside of generating general goodwill.

<comment><USER10> > Not to mention there's very little incentive to amend these policies outside > of generating general goodwill.

There is now an incentive for other companies to follow suit since savvy employees will value offers from Pinterest and other companies with this policy much more highly.

It's rare that a company like Pinterest breaks ranks on things like this. I hope they get a lot of goodwill from employees and applicants as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I brought this up recently in a negotiation and the response was that 5-10 year exercise timelines would hinder an acquisition.

Makes no sense to me, but is this a real possibility?

</comment><comment><USER12> This ties into the whole issue with bloated valuations [1]. VC's are paying for preferred shares and other deal points that make all classes of shares appear to outsiders to be vastly more valuable than they are. Employees then wind up paying inflated taxes on value that doesn't actually exist. The valuations are mostly made up, but the taxes are very real.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the- fuzzy-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-fuzzy-insane- math-that-s-creating-so-many-billion-dollar-tech-companies)

<comment><USER13> But taxes are normally paid based on the latest 409a valuation, which can be way below the preferred stock value from the latest funding round.

My impression is that companies rarely sell common stock to investors for that reason (among others). Since investors valued the preferred stock, common stock holders can ignore their massive valuation for tax purposes, and use the 409a.

<comment><USER12> Still, an appraiser brought in to do a 409a valuation wouldn't be doing their job if they completely ignored the valuation from the latest funding round. The value will be lower by a subjective amount determined by the appraiser, but is still likely to be somewhat inflated if the preferred rounds were also inflated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love this move. I, like many here, am feeling this squeeze after being terminated from a startup in the 1B club. I need to decide to exercise or not. I don't have the cash for the taxes.

Does anyone who has found buyers for their private stock without the company's blessing care to post about their experience? Any recommendations for brokers or investment groups that engage in such transactions but aren't predatory? What snags did you run into and how long did the process take?

<comment><USER15> [http://www.esofund.com/](http://www.esofund.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow! Pinterest is so generous! In my previous company, I had to exercise my options in 3 months after leaving. Now that stock's price increased by 50%.

</comment><comment><USER17> Early exercise still seems like a better option than waiting if there is a positive exit event since you get to pay capital gains rates, rather than income tax rates if you hold it for more than a year.

It certainly depends on how much risk you're willing to take on though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is this better than Pinterest covering the tax bill for employees that leave and/or are terminated? Is the latter impossible or impractical for some reason?

</comment><comment><USER19> One thing I don't see addressed is what this means regarding dilution and such. With something like this, is the company more likely to dilute its stock to try to dilute out people who have long since left the company?

If Joe Schmoe leaves the company with, say, .05% of the company, and in 7 years those shares would be worth $25m or something, wouldn't the company want to dilute that person out in order to give their current employees value?

I guess I don't really see what the big deal is on this. It would seem to me that the company would aggressively issue more stock to ensure that anyone who left the company 7 years ago couldn't possibly control more stock than current employees.

<comment><USER13> As long as the board doesn't do anything really shady, dilution generally affects all shareholders equally. (Well, the effect can be slightly different for preferred stock holders, but at least former employees will generally be in the same boat as founders and current employees.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's great they are giving new employees some flexibility here. It would be really hard to exercise a grant on an $11 billion valuation. Especially without knowing the details of the liquidation preferences.

</comment><comment><USER21> We've been trying to figure out how to do this, does anyone have the legal language that says how this works?

</comment><comment><USER22> This is sensible. Bravo Pinterest

</comment><comment><USER23> A few technical points:

1\. U.S. tax law _requires_ that incentive stock options (ISOs) have a 90-day termination tail on them - that is, the options do not qualify as ISOs if they are not issued under an enforceable agreement by which all vested options must be exercised within 90 days of termination of employment or expire.

2\. As a direct result of point 1, the near-universal practice that startups use when issuing stock options is to require employees to sign documentation by which they agree that they lose even their vested options if they do not exercise them within 90 days of their termination date.

3\. The original idea behind ISOs (the reason for distinguishing them from "non-statutory" or "non-qualified" options) is that they can be exercised at any time after they vest without triggering ordinary income tax for the exercising employee at the time of exercise (subject to certain monetary limits).

4\. However, the "benefit" note in item 3 above, though a very real benefit in days gone by, is often illusory today because the exercise of ISOs requires that the amount of the spread (difference between exercise price and fair market value of the stock at the time of exercise) be included as an item of AMT - meaning that a so-called "ISO" exercise can result in a huge AMT tax. What this means is that an employee holding vested options in a startup whose value has risen greatly faces a dilemma. "Do I exercise now, pay a huge tax, hold only a piece of paper that may or may not be worth anything down the road, and hope that the stock price holds? Or do I wait until a liquidation event, exercise at that time, and thus eliminate the large tax risk of exercising before that time?"

5\. Of course, many such employees chose to wait. If you cannot sell your stock right away, it is a very high risk to pay a massive tax on an option exercise only to wind up holding illiquid stock that may become valueless if things don't go right. _This is no small issue._ People committed suicide during the dot-bust era a decade or so ago after having made the wrong decision.

6\. The problem is exacerbated by the 90-day expiration rule on employee termination. It is one thing to wait and wait until the liquidation event. But what if it is a long time in coming? Many employees are trapped in their employment when they face the above dilemma because leaving their employment will force them to exercise or lose potentially valuable options if they don't exercise within 90 days of termination. Even worse, if their employment is terminated by the company, they are put in the horrible position of losing something they worked very hard for because of a seemingly arbitrary and stupid rule saying that the options expire within 90 days of termination.

7\. Well, guess what, the rule _is_ stupid and arbitrary in many ways. Why? Because, though the law requires that it be made part of any ISO grant, this does _not_ mean that the startup cannot modify the agreement for the benefit of the employee to eliminate the 90-day expiration provision and to give the employee room to exercise for an extended period. What happens when the company does this in spite of the tax rules? Well, it means that the option loses its character as an ISO. But it does not lose its character as a legally enforceable stock option. It just means that it is taxed as an NQO (non- qualified option). So, in a worst case, the employee exercising an NQO gets immediately taxed on the spread at the time of exercise. But, if that modification gives the employee the flexibility to carry the options unexercised but exercisable for a period going well beyond the 90-day period currently defining expiration of such options, the employee can leave employment, hold the options, and wait for such extended period (e.g., the 7 years discussed in the article here) before deciding whether to take the tax risk of exercising and holding illiquid shares. And, if, in the interim, the company does have a liquidation event, then the employee's dilemma vanishes and he can exercise and sell right away in order to make the profit and pay the associated taxes.

8\. The net result of the startup's agreeing to eliminate the 90-day provision is that employees need no longer feel trapped in their employment once their options have vested when the stock price becomes high. They can leave and still keep the option of cashing in on their hard-earned options.

9\. So why don't most companies agree to such modifications? Their lawyers will tell you that the law requires the 90-day rule and this is true but misleading because that requirement can be violated in a lawful way that simply changes the character of the options. Thus, if the parties can live with the change, why not do it routinely? Well, I leave it to everyone to draw his own conclusions. Perhaps startups want to keep their employees trapped. Perhaps they are just listening to lawyers who insist on following the rules. Or perhaps a board of directors does not feel it consistent with fiduciary duties to give employees something that appears to be a gratuitous modification that does not benefit the company. Whatever the reason, it remains true that most startups choose to leave their employees trapped in this dilemma without even giving them a good explanation beyond the fact they agreed to the condition and that the the tax laws "require" it.

In any case, kudos to Pinterest for doing the decent thing here. It is indeed all too rare to see something like this and they are to be congratulated for it.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the excellent write-up. How'd you become so knowledgeable?

<comment><USER25> He is a startup lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Way to set a good example.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow. That's amazing, Pinterest is amazing! This is a great move: Pinterest you rocks!

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious about how this works. I thought, legally, ISOs must expire within 3 months of leaving the company. Assuming they've been issuing ISOs up to now, are they converting them to something else, like NQSOs or RSUs?

<comment><USER20> ISOs are rare these days. If you have stock options, they are probably NQSOs. ISOs had too many restrictions so most companies stopped using them.

<comment><USER29> What restrictions do you mean? ISOs are better for the employee because any gain on exercise is not taxed as regular income. If the value is high enough the employee might be subject to alternative minimum tax (AMT), but the possibility of paying no tax is a benefit over NSOs whose gain is taxed as regular income and is subject to tax withholding.

<comment><USER30> > If the value is high enough the employee might be subject to alternative > minimum tax (AMT)

I've never run the numbers, but my impression is that the AMT level is low enough that AMT will be triggered for any exercise where the number and value of options is meaningful.

>but the possibility of paying no tax is a benefit over NSOs whose gain is taxed as regular income and is subject to tax withholding.

It's not "no tax". It's "deferred tax". But again, in the real world of 6-figure salaries and big mortgage interest deductions in Silicon Valley, the deferral is probably mostly theoretical. Whereas the time limits on ISOs are real and unavoidable.

<comment><USER29> Good point, "deferred tax" is more appropriate there. "No tax" is misleading.

You might be able to stay out of AMT by splitting ISO exercises across multiple tax years, but that's splitting hairs. You make a good point that this discussion is most interesting in cases where you'd likely be in AMT anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why companies give early employees options to "buy" stocks? Why can't they just be granted once vested and be done?

<comment><USER32> Taxes, mainly.

If you are very early, when the company is worth nothing, then the company can give you a big chunk of stock with no tax consequences. But once the company is worth something, then getting the stock is income, and you have to pay taxes immediately on the market value. It's not as good from the company tax perspective, either.

It's also a problem in that if the stock is already valuable, giving you the stock is the wrong reward structure. Companies are giving you options so that you have an interest in the stock going up. Suppose when you show up the share value is $40 and they give you 1,000 shares. if while you're there the stock goes up to $60, you will have received something worth $60,000, even though you only contributed to creating $20,000 of that. With options, they can give you 3,000 options with a strike price of $40. If the stock goes up to $60, then you still make $60,000 ($20 gain * 3000 options). But if it doesn't go up at all, then your options would be worthless.

<comment><USER13> > you only contributed to creating $20,000 of that

That's an interesting way to think about it, but as long as the employee is getting a base salary, the employer couldn't justify granting enough options to achieve this goal of compensation being equal to (theoretical) value added.

If we consider base salary fixed, then options are more leveraged, but a similar reward structure could be achieved by granting the same number of RSUs and reducing base salary by the exercise cost.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that the goal was for compensation to be equal to value added. I think the goal is for it to be proportional, or at least more proportional than a pure stock grant would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've nearly gone bankrupt due to AMT on ISOs, and I've also been forced to put up considerable money to exercise Non-Quals after leaving the company. I definitely applaud Pinterest's move here. My former employer went public, the top execs are still making a ton of money, and yet Finance still hasn't implemented a similar post-termination plan. A lot of former colleagues are still at the company due to 'mildly-golden' handcuffs-- the tax liability that their options present is now large and complicated. Companies that fail to adopt changes like these disadvantage themselves in a variety of subtle but important ways.

What would be even better is if smaller companies / start-ups just did 83(b) elections up-front (say on day one or year one upon cliff). Another (for larger companies) option is to just offer RSUs.

The bottom line is that opportunities via tax law complexity are not particularly _motivating_ to the majority of employees (i.e. ICs), and yet ICs are the most likely to suffer near-bankruptcy due to unexpected income tax. This is a nice step in the direction of transferring deserved wealth from 'the top' to ICs, but there's still plenty of progress to be had.

<comment><USER34> But for 83(b) to be feasible, the company has to be worth essentially zero.

Let's say you join a startup that the IRS can claim is worth $20M (based on e.g. money raising valuation), and get 1% in RSUs worth $200K - depending on your other income that year, the tax bill can easily be close to $100K (if you made $100K in salary and live in NYC) for doing an 83(b), and it is still likely to be worth zero being a startup.

And before you say "the fact it raised $2M on $20M makes preferred reflect that value, not common which is still worth zero" \- that is a common position, and the IRS almost never challenges 83(b) election valuations - <USER2> are you willing to risk that they won't start challenging them? I gave up more than one offer because I wasn't.

The bottom line is that the US tax system's taxing of virtual, unrealized, unrealizable profit is insane - I am not aware of any other western country that does that.

<comment><USER33> Hmm, in my case the 83(b) election would have cost me about a quarter year of salary, and the AMT I ended up owing was well over a year's worth of salary. My original grant was small relative to the pool because I was a mid-stage IC with essentially no prior experience. Perhaps for very early startups, or those growing quickly through valuation raises, the situation is different. My company only took on capital when we really ended it and it was cheap, but the C-levels were pretty consistently getting offers (so the valuation grew constantly, just not on paper).

Agree that the taxes on unrealized gains are insane, but they were intended to protect the government's income source from different problems. Tech compensation and VC has evolved dramatically since AMT was introduced.

<comment><USER34> It's not that tech compensation and VCs evolved - it is that AMT was not indexed to inflation (until 2013). When it was enacted, it applied to 155 families[0]. In 2008, it applied to nearly 4 million[0 again].

And I think sanity should not be judged by intention, but rather by action - especially when we've had more than 40 years to evaluate.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Growth_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Growth_of_the_AMT)

edit: added link; thanks, choppaface

<comment><USER33> Sorry, where's the citation / link for [0]? Very interesting.

<comment><USER34> Oops, sorry. Edited to add [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Growth_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Growth_of_the_AMT)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Looks like the Fortune article missed a big point: The exercise of the options often requires a big pile of money to be paid by the leaving employee to the company (ie, the strike price of the option. This occurs regardless of tax issues.)

The advantage is seeing how well the stock performs, then performing the exercise. If the company has gone public, then no real money needs to be put up by the employee; Exercise and sale can occur in one fell swoop.

<comment><USER29> > Exercise and sale can occur in one fell swoop.

You lose the reduced taxes of long term capital gains if you wait, for whatever reason, to exercise and sell the same day. You have to hold the shares for 1 year + 1 day from the day you exercise for the subsequent sale to be taxed as long term capital gains. For even the top tax bracket, the difference is 20% in taxes.

<comment><USER35> That's correct, but remember that stocks go both up and down. Back in the bubble, a lot of people got very burned: They tried to save the diff between short- and long-term cap gains and ended up losing far more because of variations in price.

To add insult to injury, many got nailed by AMT at the point of exercise. By the time they figured this out, the entire grant would not cover the bill to the Feds.

<comment><USER36> Companies allowing current employees to exercise options 1+ year before a liquidity event would prevent the tax issue. For a company like Pinterest that is virtually guaranteed to have a good liquidity event, the risk of losing your principal is minimal and you are likely being paid enough in salary to afford the early exercise strike price.

<comment><USER34> If the exercise event and the liquidity event are not in the same year though, you might not have enough cash to pay the taxes. And if the liquidity event is postponed forever (e.g., market crashes like it did in 2001 and 2008), you're stuck with a big tax bill and no way to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> FWIW, Netflix gives you 10 years. Despite the fact that I left a few weeks ago, I still have about six years left to exercise them.

<comment><USER38> Why haven't you? Aren't they public?

<comment><USER39> If the options aren't that far in-the-money, and he doesn't need the cash now, it's actually better to wait to exercise.

If he exercises now, he only gets the raw value (current price - strike).

If he waits to exercise, he get the time-value of money and implied leverage (he doesn't have to cough up the strike until he exercises), and the optionality part (if Netflix goes below the strike, he can decline to exercise).

He also can hedge by short-selling (and lock in a sure profit no matter what), but you'd need a big-value account at a brokerage to hedge on favorable terms.

<comment><USER37> > He also can hedge by short-selling (and lock in a sure profit no matter > what), but you'd need a big-value account at a brokerage to hedge on > favorable terms.

It's interesting, because I thought about this. When I worked for the company I wasn't allowed to hedge, because you can't buy shorts in the company you work for.

Now that I'm out I can, but the problem is, the company gave me such good options there is no way I can buy an opposite option for the hedge. For example, there is no retail short for more than two years, but my options still have between 6 and 9 years left.

<comment><USER39> Buy the longest term put and roll the position when it is near expiration. Don't fully hedge, just 1/2 to 1/6.

Also, don't write covered calls, that gives up too much upside. Instead, sell outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The US should follow Canada's lead and not tax exercised options until the stock is sold and _actually_ becomes income.

[http://www.taxplanningguide.ca/tax-planning- guide/section-1-...](http://www.taxplanningguide.ca/tax-planning- guide/section-1-businesses/the-taxation-stock-options/)

<comment><USER41> Even just only taxing it once it is sellable stock would be a huge improvement. Getting stuck with a taxbill for something you can't actually sell is ridiculous.

<comment><USER42> Phantom Stock:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock)

"Phantom stock grants and vesting agreements align employees' motives with owners' motives, i.e. increasing stock prices, while avoiding both taxable compensation and the need to give recipients voting or other rights typically associated with shares."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What argument is there for this policy against the employer, besides it's a nice thing to do?

The employer benefits from having the options expire because people will be less encouraged to leave with the current standard of expiring options.

<comment><USER44> It reduces anxiety. Say you are slightly unhappy at your current job. On a normal stock plan, you might start feeling that "golden handcuffs are tying me to this company", which makes you feel even worse about your position, and might actually precipitate you leaving.

Now, consider this policy instead. You'd get a feeling of "I could leave if I really wanted to, nothing is tying me to this place". You get a greater feeling of agency, of personal freedom. That relaxes you, and you feel more comfortable staying with the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Bravo. More companies that support this trend the better for the rest of us* (the non founders cohort that is).

This movement only makes me appreciate the management and culture of Pinterest; quite the opposite of the Zynga fiasco [1][2]

[1] [http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our- st...](http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or- youll-be-fired/) [2] [http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-uses-stock-options-to- keep-em...](http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-uses-stock-options-to-keep- employees-put-report-says/)

<comment><USER46> Zynga clawed back shares from underperforming founding executives, not rank- and-file employees, right?

Not that you were, but that episode always seems to be painted as though Pincus were yanking options away from sub-$100k/yr employees in the trenches.

disclaimer: I'm not defending Zynga in general, nor am I trying to take the shine off of Pinterest's policy.

<comment><USER39> I think they clawed back unvested options from many employees, who had unvested options with substantial value. That breaks the implied social contract of a startup. If the company is wildly successful, they'll try to claw back your unvested options, which makes startup equity even less attractive than it would otherwise be.

Zygna isn't the only one that did this. Didn't Facebook also do this?

(So in a startup, you can be screwed with options in three ways. If the startup fails, your equity is worth zero. If there's a low-value buyout, the common shareholders can get nothing. If the startup is wildly successful, the company will claw back your unvested options. Why join a startup for equity if you're going to get cheated when you hit the 100x home run?)

Zygna got what they deserved. With changes to the way Facebook promotes their feeds and the switch to mobile, they lost most of their market.

[http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/06/04/why-zynga-is- fai...](http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/06/04/why-zynga-is-failing-in- basic-napkin-math/)

<comment><USER47> This is the problem with the US's "at will" employment. It affects white collar tech employees too. If you could only be fired for stated misbehaviour (like in the EU), this wouldn't have been possible.

<comment><USER48> But that's why they don't hire in Europe.

<comment><USER49> Who "they"? As far as I'm aware, all mentioned companies have EU offices too.

<comment><USER48> I mean, companies in Europe hire less. If you can't fire people easily, you think thrice about anyone you hire.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AOT Compilation in HotSpot: Introduction - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/aot-compilation-in-hotspot-introduction/ <comment><USER2> This is really a great summary.</comment>


Just open sourced this Chrome extension, "GitHub Extras". Help make it awesome? - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kameeinbjnhfgamlnaofmcicajelchjn?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the GitHub repository:

<https://github.com/cambridgemike/agile-testing-extension></comment>


Second and third order consequences of coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/17YkH4kc63t7JI7JJZR6i3-iebJd7kfRAzAK_ssl8bt4/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> Looking at the creator bios, I have a tough time taking this document seriously.

Nonetheless there are some decent ideas in here, even if the presentation is less than ideal. My prediction is that many of these predictions are vastly overblown. Most companies and people are treating this as a temporary setback, not a dramatic change. The next time there is a similar event, I also doubt we will see a lockdown of this magnitude. Economists and epidemiologists will be studying this for decades and future response plans will incorporate economic consequences of public health actions.

Remote work is a good example. Expect to see some shifts toward working remotely, but not a widespread movement outside of tech. Most people _want_ to physically work with other human beings, rather than sit at home all day. I imagine we will see increased flexibility and redundancy, rather than a total shift to working online.

<comment><USER3> > Most people want to physically work with other human beings, rather than sit > at home all day.

I'd have to wait for this to be substantiated with data. A dubious data sample, but on Blind there was such a poll floating around and most participants said they prefer remote

<comment><USER2> The vast majority of people aren't on Blind and aren't answering online polls. Most people don't even know what the word _remote_ means, other than the television kind.

<comment><USER3> To add to this, developers rear towards focused individual contributor work

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the doc, the doc creator self-described as "Middle school dropout"

I'm sure the person is no dummy, but I have to wonder what is the value of highlighting this? To show they are contrarian? Does that make the doc more trustworthy? It feels like a lot of contrarians feel compelled to highlight personality traits rather than let their ideas grow root

<comment><USER2> Logical conclusion of the tech world's obsession with dropping out of college. "Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates are dropouts, so if I'm a dropout too, it means I'll be just as successful. I'll even beat them at their own cargo-culting status game by dropping out of middle school, rather than college."

<comment><USER3> A slacker once told me during university "C students are CEOs and I'm a C student, therefore all of you will work for me."

Not only is this a fallacy, the premise is not backed by data.

<comment><USER2> There's probably some truth in the idea that the students who focus obsessively on getting good grades, to the exclusion of building social connections, doing internships, etc. are less successful in a traditional career sense.

Of course that doesn't mean being a C student automatically makes you into a CEO.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A day in the life of a young black male engineering "coding" student - <AUTHOR> https://storify.com/rodneysampson/adayinthelife <comment><USER2> Wow. I expected to hear his challenges in learning to code. It seems that for some people in the world the challenge is to be treated as a legitimate person, and AFTER that you get to be stumped by learning to write code.

That is of course assuming your spirit was not broken by the process of getting to school.

</comment><comment><USER3> Codestart sounds like a great program. This is the description on their gofundme page:

> #CodeStart is a 13 month coding, entrepreneurship, career readiness and > financial readiness program innovated by Atlanta Workforce Development > Agency, TechSquare Labs and Opportunity Hub. Our current cohort includes 17 > disconnected youth and under-employed young adults from neighborhoods in the > City of Atlanta. Over the 13 month period, the students commit to a 12 week > fulltime, immersive coding bootcamp in which they learn Java. After > successful completion, they receive career readiness, culture fit and > financial literacy training. At that point, we work with the students to > gain employment as a junior entry level computer > programmer/developer/engineer. It gets better as the students will then > participate in a part-time entrepreneurial pre-accelerator and incubator > program for the remainder of the program. At the end, we aim to create a new > software programmer and a technical cofounder of a high growth startup. The > sky is the limit. It gets better. The students receive housing and a monthly > living stipend.

<comment><USER4> Here are more details. It looks like it costs $50,000 to sponsor a student for a year, so the current fundraiser will pay for about 7 students.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/293263194/TechSquare-Labs- Atlanta-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/293263194/TechSquare-Labs-Atlanta- Workforce-Development-Agency-Code-Start-School-Partner-Deck#scribd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing this story.

I used to have a job working with poor and homeless people, and the lack of banking services available to our clients was really frustrating, especially because on top of getting ripped off by check cashers, homeless people carrying around an entire benefit check in cash were frequently targeted for theft.

My roommate runs a company called Bee ([http://www.beecard.us](http://www.beecard.us)) that's working to put check cashers out of business and provide banking services for people who wouldn't otherwise have them, and its one of the best uses of technology to solve a real social problem I've seen.

<comment><USER6> There are also various proposals to restore somethign like the old US Postal Savings System [0], where post-offices would (not for the first time) provide very basic bank-services.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System)

<comment><USER7> I wonder if you could build a viable bank/credit union with the specific focus to provide free/extremely lost cost banking to persons who otherwise don't have access. Perhaps subsidized by patrons with more money.

<comment><USER8> This has been done. Remember the 2008 housing crisis? That's what the bad MBSes were: subsidizing those who couldn't make their mortgage payments with money from those who could, by packaging the bad loans and good loans together.

I know we're talking about checking accounts. That was tried too -- it was called Washington Mutual, and they were my bank when I was finding my legs out in Portland, OR. Free checking account, no questions asked? Sure, I'll take that.

Biggest bank crash in U.S. history.

So no, such a financial institution is not viable as such. It would have to be run explicitly as a charity.

There are no easy solutions here. To change the situation will require multiphasic, multipartite, cultural AND systemic efforts.

<comment><USER9> > I know we're talking about checking accounts. That was tried too -- it was > called Washington Mutual,

Is there evidence to suggest the "free checking account no questions asked" was large portion of it being one of the "Biggest Bank crash in U.S. history". It looks like Washington Mutual crashed for the same reason the others did: it had all this loans out on people who couldn't pay them. Not because it offered checking/savings accounts to underprivileged. It's weird you reference the 2008 collapse then fail to mention that being the exact time when WaMu crashed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sad to see this young man treated poorly.

Those check cashing places are notoriously shady. In future, might I suggest Walmart. They cash any check with proper ID for a mere $3 and won't call the police because you're black.

<comment><USER11> Nah, they'll just pay their workers minimum wage into accounts with exorbitant fees, thereby circumventing minimum wage laws. Many of those workers being black.

I really don't wanna hear about Walmart as a solution to any sort of inequality, that's ridiculous.

<comment><USER12> It's not being proposed as a solution to inequality, only as a way to cash a check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story is so messed up on a few levels.

First, a question, why money order and not cheque? Naively I think the latter would be a better system.

Second, why is a place that charges 10+% the best way the (first? best? only?) option for this person? It's not even a case of not having ID here.

> I stood in amazement watching the police tell this young man that they did > him a favor by not hauling him off to jail immediately.

Wow, what a god damn favor. The sad thing is, is it even the police' fault in this case.

> He was livid. I was livid. I literally wanted to break down crying on the > spot. It took everything in me to stand tall & resolute.

Just depressing.

> Opening more bank accounts. Teaching financial literacy. Teaching wealth > building.

So here's something I think is sad. I'm pretty awful with my finances. I made a very good wage and while I'm not over extended I don't tend to save as much as I should. It's something I work on. But! I have a savings account since I was about 10, and a chequing account since I got my first job. The idea of being denied banking access, whether explicitly or by societal issues, is simply not something I have ever even had to worry about.

<comment><USER13> I was unbanked for a couple months when I first moved to New York years ago, because I couldn't open a bank account without a utility bill. Eventually the way I got a bank account was because my employer brought one in to sign up employees.

Huge numbers of people cash their paychecks at check cashing places. This is just what it's like to be poor in America. You take 10% off the top to cash your paycheck, literally everything costs more, and then you get a bunch of lectures from privileged people about how you need to be more responsible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not saying that this wasn't racially motivated, but aren't a huge proportion of people who use these check cashing places minorities? Looks like the store employee was black, too, based on the image.

It's definitely messed up what they did (and completely messed up that calling the police got the kids threatened with arrest), but I wouldn't be surprised if this boiled down to the stipend being for more than the normal amount that they usually see from people in his age cohort.

Either way, it's a good thing he had people he could call to settle this for him.

<comment><USER15> >but I wouldn't be surprised if this boiled down to the stipend being for more than the normal amount that they usually see from people in his age cohort.

I would bet that this, together with the fact that it didn't show up in their system, was the cause, not predatory racism.

The article is claiming that the student was "being impacted by predatory racism." I don't see any proof of this. The cops are black, the employee is black. If everyone would have skin colour $skin_colour, would it still be racism?

<comment><USER16> I think what he meant by "predatory racism" is the very existence of the check-cashing industry with predatory fees for cashing checks (in this case, 10%, which is actually a low rate for the industry). It used to be payday loans, but when Georgia ruled those illegal, the same companies simply changed their names to some variation of "check cashing" and continued to charge exorbitant fees to teens working through (or instead of) high school and immigrants, most of whom are minorities, who can't get a bank account because of their age and/or immigrant status.

Those workers are paid via check, and since they don't have a bank account to deposit the check into, they often resort to the check cashing robber barons who will do anything they can to take as much money as possible from their "clients". Holding a teen's ID and money order ransom because he "fits a profile" sounds like par for the course when it comes to those morally bankrupt businesses.

As for the race of everyone involved in this particular case, I take it you've never been to Atlanta. I live there, and I can say first hand that even black cops in the city will profile black youth.

<comment><USER17> "who can't get a bank account because of their age and/or immigrant status"

Or because of Chexsystems, which bars you from getting an account pretty much anywhere for 5 years. I was a victim of that years ago, and it really screws your life up. you have (or had at the time) no choice but to utilize check cashing services like the shady one in the article. It isn't always as simple as "go to the bank that the check was written from" either.

It can cost a lot to be poor in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> By law the bank issuing the check has to make good on the check.

The non-profit should use a large, well known commercial bank for their business account, cut the students checks from there and give them a ride down to the local branch.

Bank of America for instance would take a BofA check, cash it for the full amount in cash the same day without taking a cut. It's what checks were originally designed to do.

I've been unbanked before and it sucks but, it's not impossible to overcome. Also, why are they give young people such large checks and/or money orders?

If it's a money order, you can get cashed at various places for free. All you need is legal government ID. The whole point of a money order is that it's pre-secured. The money is already set aside for it. The only thing to be done is to validate that it hasn't been cashed previously. In theory this is near zero-risk for the cash issuer.

It's not so much that we need to create more options, those exist. We need to educate people on this so that you aren't taken for a ride of 10%+ off of giving out cash for a money order.

People need to be more informed of the market options and understand how the market works. What the difference between a check and a money order is.

I grew up poor and had to educate myself on these matters. It's incredible that there aren't even basic financial literacy classes in middle school and high school.

These ideas contribute greatly to society in helping people become and stay financially stable which leads to a great number of social outcomes.

10% for cashing your paycheck is a hell of a hidden tax. Taking that 10% and using it wisely will in aggregate keep people out of poverty longer, let families be more stable, food secure, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Weirdly, this was marked dead, so I vouched for it. I'd appreciate it if others could keep an eye on it, as I have to head out for dinner now.</comment>


Windows could be required to use some Linux apps (Embrace, extend, extinguish) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/greatgib42/status/1262820102300479492 <comment><AUTHOR> My comment, copied from the other thread on the same subject:

Here is how I would sum it up:

* They create a new kernel file descriptor: /dev/dxg

* With this, on the Linux of WSL, it is like a direct "pipe" to a Windows host graphical stack.

* So it means that they can put code in Linux application code that will use Windows proprietary graphical stacks, like DirectX through /dev/dxg.

* And so, clearly, this Linux app will not work inside a normal Linux computer that is not a "guest" of Windows.

Now, you can see the "Embrace" and the "Extend"?

And to well understand the article, the following things have to be stressed: This is not just something to render a Window or something like that, it is a special "passthrough" api to all the things that are provided by Windows GPU stack/drivers.

For example, they give the example of Cuda compute API, but also, they kind of "built" DirectX sdk itself for Linux (debian, ubuntu, ...), but still the proprietary closed blob that "apps" are expected to use, but that will rely on /dev/dxg.

Also, if you want to use anything OpenGL on the Linux WSL, they will ensure that it is translated to DX on Linux side, before going through the same special DirectX api. The good thing would probably have been to do the opposite side, ensure that Windows has the proper OpenGL support to be able to pass gpu acceleration to the Windows host.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the blog post from Microsoft with all the scary details: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart- linux](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux)</comment>


When Discs Die - <AUTHOR> http://tedium.co/2017/02/02/disc-rot-phenomenon/ <comment><USER2> Back when hard disks were expensive and CD-R(W) discs (relatively) cheap, I used to do backups and move less used stuff to CD's. A number of years later when this was no longer true (and CD's were becoming laughably small) I moved all the data back to hard drives. In the process I discovered that a fairly large fraction of the discs had developed some minor corruption. Luckily I was able to recover the vast majority thanks to GNU ddrescue ( [https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/](https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/) ).

The bottom line is that for long term preservation you really need to keep multiple copies, preferably on multiple mediums, and regularly check and recopy them before the medium gets so obsolete you can no longer access it.

(Yes, I realize the article touches factory pressed discs rather than CD-R's although there is a short mention of such discs too)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if there is some sort of archiving software that is able to encode parity bits similar to how RAID5 works in order to help recovery in the event of corruption to part of the disk.

<comment><USER4> You can use WinRAR with zero compression and recovery volumes.

This is useful if you have a bunch of little files - you WinRAR them into a single file with recovery volumes, and then you can create a bunch of PAR2 files on top.

I'm not saying this is a sensible thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This knowledge should be more widespread imo, pretty sure there are still people out there assuming CDs are like indestructible. Once I started a job and after a couple of months I discovered there was a closet containing hundreds of CD-Rs all neatly labelled and seemingly containing things like fMRI data used in research. You should have seen the faces of colleagues and the guy responsible for the backups of their data when I told them CD-Rs where not exactly the most durable way of storing important data. (I figured this out because of the very first audio cd copies I had started to develop unexplained errors). They didn't believe me so I randomly picked a couple of discs and like the third one was completely unreadable (I/O errors on ls or so, don't remember).

<comment><USER6> Gosh I remember how many IO errors occurred on those early and / or cheap CD- Rs like 'Transonic', 'TDK', 'Maxell' and all those other dreadful light green or light blue coloured Cyanine ink based coasters. I remember trying to backup my MP3 collection many, many years ago and trying to afford tens upon tens of decent quality Verbatim or similar brand discs and burning them slower than their top rated write speeds in an effort to make them as durable as possible.

I remember getting my first 40x or 50x writer, that thing sounded like it was going to blow apart at any moment, I think I used to limit write speeds to a maximum of 16-24x at most.

And then hard disks (or hard discs which I believe is an equality technically valid spelling) started to drop in price, ended up with a pile of those quantum fireball 850's, if you had these you'll remember having to 'tap' them on the top to help them spin up as I assume the baring fluid / grease would harden enough to prevent the drives from spinning up if they'd been powered down for more than a week or so.

</comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim There are works out there where the master tapes have long since vanished that we can only enjoy today by virtue of the durability of the vinyl/shellac the original copies were pressed upon. It's scary to consider how more obscure digitally-issued releases risk evaporating entirely.

I dismissed analog purists like Steve Albini as cranky old men until recently, when I realized they have a real point w/r/t preservation.

<comment><USER7> The major film studios already do this: they create a tape print (this process is one of the only reasons Kodak still exists) of every film, including digitally shot/processed ones, and store them underground. A hard drive might die in 5 to 10 years but film is guaranteed for 100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I bought my first CDs in 1984, and played them on the world's first CD player - the Sony CDP-101. Of the hundreds of discs in my collection, I had maybe 3-4 from that decade go bad. What worked for me was storing them in the jewel boxes on edge (not laying flat), indoors away from sunlight.

So far as "Disc Rot", as a former LaserDisc owner, I'm very familiar with it. On the 12" platters the glue between sides could fail and sometimes lift the aluminum recording surface off the plastic. Or the edge seal would fail and oxygen would turn the aluminum into aluminum oxide. Both would make a $70 movie (in 1988 dollars!) unplayable.

I'm sad to see CDs go. As has been told, they're the first recording format that was replaced by one with inferior sound. I never had many LPs, and don't have the storage space for them, but I get that they get the listener more involved - you have to consider which album to listen to and set aside 50 minutes (including the side flip). You can't just hit "random play" and walk away. So it's nice to see them make a comeback.

<comment><USER9> CDs had a big problem with mastering. They either have a bad sound from CD being a new format (Zappa 80s CDs suffered from this) or since the mid-late 90s are brickwalled to hell thanks to the loudness war.

Obviously there are plenty of fine CD versions of albums out there, but I heard enough poorly mastered CDs and spent enough time searching 2nd hand stores for known good versions to not be worried about the format going away.

<comment><USER8> > CDs had a big problem with mastering.

You are correct. Lots of the early releases once the goldrush started still had their RIAA equalization on them (aka "shovelware"). Even those that used original sources simply didn't sound all that good because of the mastering engineer's inexperience (first release of _The Wall_ , I'm looking at you). There were still gems made though, like _Brothers in Arms_

Because of the loudness war, I've started looking for earlier releases on discogs.com. Anything listed as "Remastered" is viewed with suspicion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Few years ago I bought a new DVD drive and it came with a CD that claim to last for a 1000 years. [1]

I really wish I could test it, but I lost the disc already.

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

<comment><USER11> If there were a CD that guaranteed I would be able to use it in 1000 years, I would buy it in a minute!

<comment><USER12> This is the company that makes em. [http://www.mdisc.com/](http://www.mdisc.com/)

<comment><USER13> I think Stratoscope's point was the guarantee that _Stratoscope_ could still use it in 1000 years (IOW, that they'd still be alive then).

<comment><USER12> They've been around for 5 years and good quality brands support them. Maybe they won't last, but it's a better gamble than a pack of cd-r discs from walmart!

<comment><USER13> Let me be a little more explicit. Stratoscope was willing to purchase the disc on the promise that Stratoscope would _personally_ be able to read the disc 1000 years from now.

IOW, not just that the _data_ would be there and readable, but that _Stratoscope (the person)_ would also have lived another 1000 years.

<comment><USER12> Ahaha that blew right over my head!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is my nightmare, I spent years collecting for a full PAL Sega Saturn collection. Reading 'disc rot' in any form always reminds me I need to prioritize ripping my collection sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER15> _But when I learned about this problem, I checked my several hundred discs between Sega CD, Turbo CD, Saturn, and even Dreamcast games and found DOZENS had this problem. Several expensive games I owned were mint—except when held to the light I could see one or more little white dots that proved my game had damage. Some of these I went back to play after not touching for years and found they now would occasionally lock up or not play at all. I had a few FACTORY SEALED games that I opened and found the same thing.

It has been a nerve-shattering nightmare for a collector like me._

So should I worry about my factory sealed copies of FF7 and Xenogears? Also, is there any sort of "rot" that may occur with cartridge-based items? I have some unopened NES and SNES games as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> Never thought about it, but if you're a collector of some sort you would be pissed to see your collection destroy itself through no fault of your own

</comment><comment><USER17> If you backup your data (on whatever media) I'd recommend to use some kind of bitrot detection tool. For example [https://github.com/laktak/chkbit](https://github.com/laktak/chkbit)

When you later restore you will at least know if/what is damaged. Multiple backups help too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Never liked the CD/DVD physical medium.

Convenient, yes. Sounds great too. But far more prone to physical damage (scratches, etc) than tapes or records, in my personal experience. Lost count of the number of times a $20+ movie was destroyed after being in a childs hands.

<comment><USER19> Mini Disc or cassette seemed better because there were a case around the support that was making harder to damage it. If for some reason, a cassette was broken, it was still possible to move the tape to another case (tricky but not impossible, nice little hacks needed).

People got too fascinated by the shinny colorful reflection of CDs.

<comment><USER5> _fascinated by the shinny colorful reflection of CDs_

And then later on even more fascinated with the production of all black cd's etc. To be honest, I like those as well, probably just beacuse it's something different.

And yes there's something to say for the sturdyness of MD and the 'openness' (almost open-source like lol) of tape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the subject of discs, I just realised I can't actually remember the last time I used CD / rotational optical media of some kind, I honestly can't! If I had to guess what the reason for it might have been I'd probably go with some obscure band (music) that only had physical distribution - but generally in those cases (no pun intended) I'd most likely but the CD to support the artist then check on what.cd (R.I.P) (pun slightly intended) and saved myself the pain of finding an optical drive and ripping it into my collection. It's likely it would have been something like that I think.

Sorry for being a bit off-topic there but it was a bit of a 'oh, wow!' moment.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thinking on the 3-2-1 backup strategy[1], the "2" refers to "two different mediums". Some say that means two different hard drives, but with articles like this I argue that it should be "two different forms of media."

Of course, that's just referring to my personal data. With media like what is covered in the article, copyright law (incl. the DMCA) comes in to play, potentially limiting your options.

[1]: [https://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud- backup/business/resources...](https://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud- backup/business/resources/carbonite-blog/what-is-3-2-1-backup/)

</comment><comment><USER21> A related question is when flash memory dies.

<comment><USER22> Replaced by what?

<comment><USER23> Memristors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Man... this post makes me want to go rip all my old disc-based PC games, but... I don't even have an optical drive in my PC anymore...

<comment><USER25> That's easy to fix. External drives are pretty cheap (~$25 for DVD). Or you can track down ISOs, even for fairly obscure things, various places online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cheap bootleg DVDs from China often experienced rapid rot because of poor quality control.</comment>


Which is more secure, DotNet or Ruby on Rails? - <AUTHOR>

I've been building a web app using Ruby on Rails. Recently, someone asked me why I wasn't developing in DotNet, stating that it was much more secure. I searched a bit, but all the articles I found comparing the security of DotNet and Rails seem to be more than a year old. Does anyone have a current opinion on this issue? <comment><USER2> The dominating factor in whether your web application is secure or not will not be whether you choose to write it in .NET or Rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> Geez, thanks for that truly insightful comment!

I'm a CISSP and CISM and a Ruby/Rails developer. I practice secure coding techniques and know the benefits of security testing.

What I'm asking, if it isn't obvious, is which has more outstanding vulnerabilities. I'm also asking for opinions on the _current_ security of each.

<comment><USER3> Neither has any outstanding critical security vulnerabilities, which is normal for any web framework.

The "security" of a web framework is not a well-defined quantity.

Your question is malformed, and you got an answer that you should listen to: your choice of web framework is not a very important factor in the security of your site.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if that's quite right... There was a huge rails vulnerability a little while ago (something to do with YAML executing arbitrary code) -- and I'm not sure I have seen anything thus with .NET (not to say it's not there).

If you decide to go with certain versions of .NET, entire attack vectors will be closed, but ONLY because there are entire sets of features missing that you might get with Rails.

<comment><USER5> I typed "zero day .NET" into Google as a proxy for actual research and got back results from 2010, early 2011, and late 2011. All seemed to be publicizing critical .NET patches, which is what you want to see.

Presumably this barely scratches the surface of the list of .NET patches with potential security implications. The ideal security patch goes out quietly and gets applied quietly, after all.

I'm not going to take the time for a more exhaustive search, because I've got the knowledge I'm looking for: .NET is not made of magic, such that it has not had critical patches for half a decade and I can safely choose to let it run itself. If I run a .NET stack, I'll need to watch for critical patches and apply them ASAP. If I run a Rails stack I'll need to do the same. This is the state of the art and nobody has a silver bullet for it.

Meanwhile, it remains the case that the overwhelming issue in site security is my own decisions as an implementor, either architectural (e.g. "do administrators share the same login path as tens of thousands of users?") nuts-and-bolts ("did I sanitize each and every one of those queries or did I make an error late at night?") or even strategic ("did I notice that scary article about the new style of attack against compressed HTTP, and note how it applies to my stack and my application?")

<comment><USER4> Yes, in the end, as others have stated, it's definitely your job to make sure that you follow the practices that will make your system safe, but I'm essentially hoping that .NET is so old that most gaping security holes have already been found

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be honest, being a guy in both lands for living, ASP.NET is much more to offer as a base framework that worries about security.

Obviously, now and then security vulnerabilities opens up, in all such occasions RoR prompts before you think about MS patch! It is something to do with MS release cycles, even though you can fix it as most of this frameworks (ASP.NET MVC or Web Api) are opensource ones.

I think your question is open ended that you cannot expect one answer.

For example, if you're worried about SQL Injections it is purely a framework like Entity Framework or NHibernate is to question about or in other cases how you're dealing with SQL queries (Are you using StringBuilder to build your query yet?) otherwise there are answers in both the land for every __known __security issues.

<comment><USER7> Idiomatic code on both Rails and .NET is about equally likely to harbor SQL injection vulnerabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since Ruby and Rails are completely open sourced, there are no _backdoors_ involved.... But every now and then some critrical _bugs_ occur.

After all the fun we had with the NSA lately, and the stories of eg. skype calling home with your (at least) [https://](https://) links posted in the chat... Do you trust microsoft that _every single piece_ of their softwarestack has no backdoors? Oh, and security patches for .NET are released regulary, so there are enough bugs, too.

This is my _current opinion_ as you asked for it.

<comment><USER7> That is a pretty uninformed and unhelpful opinion. Microsoft's code is the most heavily reverse engineered in the entire industry; code Microsoft ships is just about the worst possible place to sneak an NSA backdoor, since even innocuous weirdness is enough to generate a news story about it.

If the NSA wants your server stack, they're going to use the hardware to get it. But the reality is, the NSA doesn't need to backdoor your servers.

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)

<comment><USER7> Is an urban myth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just did an internal communication for my client about of two particular platforms, which is more secure.

To start with, security isn't really a scalar measurement; a vector maybe closer. But all it takes is one tiny vulnerability in a remote corner of the application to open up the door to complete compromise.

Rather than vulnerabilities in underlying platforms such as .net/asp.net ruby/rails, more vulnerabilities are the result of erroneous application programming or mis-configuration.

And the age of the articles that you mention won't be much help in your search, as vulnerabilities are noticed in very old platforms, such as the recent issue with the old version of rails.

You are more likely to introduce a vulnerability in your application than being exposed to risks by either of these two platforms.</comment>


Facebook plans to launch 'GlobalCoin' currency in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48383460 <comment><USER2> Political upheaval didn't cause any regulation, but this surely will.</comment>


Silicon Valley Looks for Lessons in Theranos - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-looks-for-lessons-in-theranos-1468402201 <comment><USER2> "Baghdad Bob is not a good behavorial model for a CEO to follow."</comment>


Which is the best credit card processing service for an ecommerce site? - <AUTHOR>

If you are serving people from all over the world. In terms of charges, ease of integration, setup, reporting, etc. etc. Please include pros and cons while comparing. Expecting nice comparison between Paypal, Stripe, Braintree, Intuit, etc. <comment><USER2> Stripe, hands down.

If you are just starting, go with Stripe because it's easy to get up and running and the documentation is great. And it's designed beautifully from the API to the dashboard. I want to work with companies that make great products and I'm happy to pay premium for that.

If you're looking to switch from an existing provider, you could make the decision based on who has the lowest rate, but unless you're doing over $1mm/yr the difference is only ~$1000. Hardly worth the time you'll spend.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best is too difficult to quantify without parameters that matter. Stripe is almost certainly the easiest to integrate quickly, but is definitely not the cheapest. Paypal has perhaps the broadest reach to potential customers, but doesn't work for certain payment types. Braintree is perhaps the cheapest at scale, but is more complicated to set up and has monthly minimums, making it ill-suited for bursty vendors.

They're all good, and they're all likely to meet a given need, but it would be easier to give a better answer if you list your criteria. Otherwise, you might have better luck on Quora (or here, maybe?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response. Users I am initially targeting are based in Singapore but eventually it should be able to cater people from all over the world, and the service I would like to use ( Stripe ) is from US. That means there is a lot of hidden charges incurred while converting SGD to USD by the customer bank based in Singapore ( or in other countries. ) Therefore, the most important parameters for me is minimizing the charges and ability to expand to other countries.</comment></comment>


AAPL - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL

<comment><AUTHOR> The title I set was "AAPL -10%" but for some reason it was truncated to "AAPL".

Background TL;DR: disappointing Q1 report.

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _disappointing Q1 report_

Did Gruber read a different report because he seems to think they broke all sorts of records this quarter. He's pretty impartial about Apple, right? :)

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/01/23/apple-q1-2013-re...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/01/23/apple-q1-2013-results)

<comment><USER2> Apple broke records for quarterly sales and profit with $54.5 billion in sales and $13.1 billion in profit in the quarter ended Dec. 29.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cause seems to be lower iPhone sales than were expected: [http://abcnews.go.com/Business/aapl-aapl-apple- sells-48-mill...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/aapl-aapl-apple- sells-48-million-iphones/story?id=18287778)

<comment><USER4> That'll be because everyone's got one now...

More seriously, YTD is not pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure I follow this. A like to Google quoting Apple's stock price?

<comment><USER6> Apple stock is down (currently) at -9.70% in after hours.

<comment><USER7> Ahh, I see now: "After Hours: 460.49 -53.52 (-10.41%)"

<comment><USER5> So the news is the stock quote? I got it now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> what?</comment>


Why Every Ruby Developer Should Learn Smalltalk - <AUTHOR> http://victorsavkin.com/post/16375110741/why-smalltalk <comment><USER2> This should really be "Why every developer should learn Smalltalk." Dan Ingalls gave a keynote at jsconf demoing Lively Kernel, a SmallTalk-like, image-based, in-browser IDE written in JavaScript. His demo received a standing ovation and was the thing I heard talked about most during the social events.

We're obviously not far from being able to have SmallTalk-quality interactions with things we build in the browser. Brent Victor's recent talk has spurred a lot of work on more-interactive development environments, some of them in the browser.

I would really like an old SmallTalker to spend some time researching and thinking about the old tools they had: which were valuable, which were more trouble then they were worth? What mistakes did they make that they wish they had done differently? It would be an excellent briefing for the next few years of work on the web.

<comment><USER3> (A small note: it's traditional to not capitalize the t in Smalltalk. Old- timers take that as a signal that text was written by a non-dev.)

 _thinking about the old tools they had: which were valuable, which were more trouble then they were worth?_

A seasoned Smalltalker would have spent more time talking about the Debugger. I was teaching a Smalltalk class once, and this one student who was a quant from a New York financial firm just spontaneously exclaimed: "This debugger is from God!" It was very fast, responsive, and was "well integrated" with the environment. More on that...

EDIT: As I took the time to say elsewhere, there really isn't that much "integration." It's more that the environment is so minimalist that it lacks many barriers present in other environments. Just about every single instance of every object has the equivalent of a REPL, and finding a particular instance in the middle of runtime debugging typically takes just a second.

Even the "IDE" really isn't one. (And I should know, because I've written a good portion of a commercial Smalltalk browser.) Aside from the refactoring mechanisms, it's a pretty lightweight and basic browser on objects -- it just so happens they're the meta-level.

 _What mistakes did they make that they wish they had done differently?_

A big mistake: exorbitant per-seat developer licenses, and positioning as the "secret weapon" of the Fortune 500. Another oft-cited one was the Parcplace/Digitalk merger and the ensuing conflicts. Most of the mistakes had to do with community and how the ecosystem did/didn't interact with the rest of the programming world. Technologically, there was a lot of goodness.

<comment><USER4> Even better is the interaction between the test runner and the debugger. Unit tests are orders of magnitude more useful when you can just open a debugger on a failing assertion.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the integration between the debugger and Seaside... I always get a few jaw drops when I fix code and the page comes up once I press "Proceed".

<comment><USER3> The thing is, that's not really "integration." That's just the Debugger doing what it usually does. There's no abstruse code supporting that. (Usually Smalltalk environment "integration" does require a few lines of pedestrian code.)

<comment><USER4> Well, Seaside does have explicit code to support the debug link. If you get an exception during rendering, the framework generates a 500 response with a "Debug" link. Clicking the link restarts the previous request, and when it hits the exception, it opens a debugger instead of generating the 500 response. If you fix the error and continue, the page is sent to the browser as usual.

It's not a _lot_ of code, but it's pretty clever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        forecast := service forecastForDays: 5 format: 'Xml'.

The equivalent ruby is shown as:

        forecast = server.forecastForDaysInFormat(5, "xml")

The example is illustrative, and a ruby code in the wild will generally use positional arguments or pass hashes around, rather than implementing weirdly named methods:

        forecast = server.forecast(5, "xml")
        forecast = server.forecast(days: 5, format: "xml")

That is not to say weirdly named methods aren't used. Activerecord dynamic finders are one example that comes to mind `Model.find_by_first_name_and_last_name`, but they are named so to provide information to method_missing hook.

> If you need to pass multiple blocks to a method in Ruby it always looks > clunky and probably that's why it's not a common idiom:

        service.forecastFor ->{puts "Do stuff"}, ->{puts "handling errors"}

I don't think the examples are clunky at all. It is similar in all languages which treat functions as first class datatypes.

In ruby, you use "one block" or pass multiple lambdas. It isn't any different from smalltalk example, except for superficial syntactic difference.

> When you start writing a new app in Smalltalk you don't open Emacs or > RubyMine you launch a VM.

I don't know much about Smalltalk, but this IDE/VM approach must be damn substantive to make up for not using Vim. The way the article puts it makes it sounds like "don't open Emacs" is a positive, which is seldom the case with people who use a lot of emacs/vim.

<comment><USER3> _I don't know much about Smalltalk, but this IDE/VM approach must be damn substantive to make up for not using Vim._

The thing about the IDE, is that there's hardly any of it there. It's all just objects that each effectively have their own REPL, and you're directly manipulating all of them.

You can actually start writing a debugger in most Smalltalk environments, and you'll have something that lets you browse a stack trace in under 5 minutes. (If you know the API for dealing with stack traces. A newb or someone out of practice will take longer, but most of it will be reading the API.)

An engineer I know was bored in his "Intro to Smalltalk" class and spent 10 minutes writing a tool that compiles and evaluates code. The exact same code made it into the production "IDE" and was there for over a decade.

The thing is, there's such an amazing amount of "integration" in the environment, you'd think there was tons of ingenious code written by teams of geniuses, but there isn't. It's just that a lot of unnecessary stuff has been removed and made runtime, so everything is available for you to see and change.

It's one of the best examples of how minimalism can work very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are lots of good points made here, but I'll add one: write the environment in itself. The original vision for Smalltalk is that you would be using some application, get curious about how it worked (or want to change it), press ctrl-C to start a debugger, start reading code, start editing, get curious about how the debugger works, press ctrl-C again, start reading code, start editing... That smooth progression from application user to programmer to tool developer was a conscious design goal of Smalltalk (also of Lisp), and has gotten lost somewhere along the way. Once you take responsibility for your own tools you quickly learn to use your new-found powers sparingly, but it's a completely different feeling being a programmer in an environment you can modify than being a programmer in an environment someone else made and you can't touch.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love reading introductions to languages. But holding them up in comparison to just one other language is often problematic. I don't think this article does ruby much justice (e.g. the syntax stuff, and especially the bit about ruby's lack of debugging tools: <https://github.com/pry/pry>). I found myself wanting to defend ruby. Which is very distracting, and entirely beside the point, because really I just wanted to learn a little bit more about smalltalk.

<comment><USER9> I guess the point of the author is that no language can have a debugger as powerful as Smalltalk's, as having the code, the state and the tools live in the same environment is the only way you can go as deep as Smalltalk debuggers go.

If you're editing your code in an editor, running it in an interpreter and storing the state in your RAM, there's no way your editor is gonna be able to stop at a point of your stack to let you modify a piece of code live, or add a method, or override an operator, or change the class of a living object and continue as if nothing ever happened.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty much what Pry provides for Ruby.

It might not be as polished as the Smalltalk tools yet, but there's no inherent problem doing this with Ruby. There might be some things you can't do in pure Ruby, such as perhaps replacing a class pointer to actually change the class of an object, but low level hackery like that is easily enough done with a small C extension - I've poked around in MRI's C-level view of the object model before and it's pretty simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to do smalltalk for a job (internship, but still learned a lot). I love it, it's a terribly under-appreciated language.

I think what ended up sidelining it was that it didn't really integrate well with the rest of the system. Part of this was the syntax, even though you could bridge it with C, it was awkward. IE, "something.f(a,b,c)" would become "something f: a with: b with: c". Smalltalk's syntax is really cool when you're just working within the smalltalk system itself, but at the edges it gets clunky.

The other problem is smalltalk just seems to like living in its own world. Even now that's largely the case. (Fun challenge: try making a smalltalk app that isn't easily recognizable as a smalltalk app.)

Given what Clojure is to lisp, I hope too there can be a "Clojure for smalltalk", if you will. Something that captures what's really cool about the language but throws away the historical baggage and makes it integrate well with the rest of the system.

<comment><USER12> > Fun challenge: try making a smalltalk app that isn't easily recognizable as > a smalltalk app.

It is true that both Lisp and Smalltalk make it very easy for people to build things that would normally take a team and an architecture. This has the down side that if it's easy to build something that acts sort of like a button, that's what ships rather than bridging to some OS button. It's a lot of work to implement for no obvious benefit, especially to the Smalltalk programmer who is using the system because they like it and don't mind the differences. This seems like exactly the sort of thing that would make for-pay Smalltalk systems viable, but nobody seems to be willing to pay for a language now. Even if it would be cheaper in the long run, it's harder to do the math and it's hard to compete with free.

> I hope too there can be a "Clojure for smalltalk", if you will.

I think this is a concept that should be explored in more depth. Some things I'd toss out as worth discussing:

\- Having a standard library or syntax for defining classes (GNU Smalltalk addresses this)

\- Real namespacing, because I'm sick of seeing XXYYZZClassName

\- Sexy, dirt-simple FFI to C or Java. Probably, as you point out, through a standard calling convention for external stuff (maybe borrow the Block API, something f value: a value: b value: c).

I think apart from these things you could really build the Smalltalk of tomorrow in the Smalltalk of today. You need really good OS integration, especially graphically but every other way as well. You probably need to be able to serialize the system to ordinary flat text files so you can use modern VC.

I know Juan Vuletich has been rebuilding the standard image his way from the ground up with Cuis but as far as I can tell progress is stalled. Other than that I don't know of any big project besides Pharo, which is even more modest, really just about removing crap from Squeak and producing a professional shame-free open source Smalltalk.

<comment><USER12> Literally two days after I said this, Juan released a new version of Cuis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is one of the reasons I like objective-c. Lots of people hate its verbosity, but I love that you can almost read it like english (assuming you name stuff sanely).

<comment><USER14> A word of caution... :) I had a similar experience with Obj-C and decided to give smalltalk a try. After a brief struggle and period of wetware refactoring, I can longer stand to work in anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone provide a suggestion on what to use to learn Smalltalk under Windows? The article mentions both Squeak and Pharo, of which only I've used Squeak briefly in college, but there I really had a hard time with the interface. At least I felt like I completely hosed my Smalltalk VM more than once. I have not tried Pharo. It appears that there is also Dolphin Smalltalk.

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> _I've used Squeak briefly in college, but there I really had a hard time with the interface._

Well, they have a "burn the diskpacks" philosophy, so the interface is very different and changes a lot of conventions.

 _At least I felt like I completely hosed my Smalltalk VM more than once._

This is something very different and weird you'd have to get used to. Hosing your VM is actually no big deal. There's a way to recover from that quickly without losing any source code changes. I would try Pharo. Dolphin was a nice environment, but that was so long ago.

(Since Smalltalk gives you the power to do anything, even with your meta- level, it >has< to work like this. Otherwise, people would feel timid about manipulating their meta-level.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It amuses me greatly to see it point out how much more readable Smalltalk's method syntax is (i.e. "it skips the . operator") immediately before launching into an example of how great Smalltalk is that it doesn't have an if() construct and needs to define methods to dispatch on conditions.

Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days) and definitely worth learning. But that bit is cognitive dissonance at its best.

<comment><USER17> _Smalltalk is great (mostly for historic reasons these days)_

In my experience coming to Pharo Smalltalk after a 15 year journey through C, C++, VB, PHP, ObjC, and Ruby (my second favorite lang), I can say that none of the reasons I find Smalltalk awesome are historical. This idea that one should "learn Smalltalk to bring those lessons with you to the language you 'really' plan on using" is a silly idea, often repeated.

Most importantly, Smalltalk is an environment, not a language...

The Smalltalk community is full of talented developers doing cutting edge research and serious commercial applications. We use Smalltalk, for example, because its live, open, dynamic environment makes it a joy to use and blows productivity through the roof. Having complete control over the IDE is a dream - as a small example, when I got tired of constantly navigating to my default code directory, I added a default setting to Pharo Smalltalk, in about 5 minutes, so I and every other user could benefit. This kind of enhancement is routine because it's so damn easy! Even in Ruby, it's a hassle to dig through a lib's source files and find the code to edit. In Smalltalk, one can drill down through the UI (from menus, windows, etc.) into the actual code, or set a breakpoint launching a debugger on the running system. What other OS (Squeak/Pharo can run on bare metal) lets you do that, all in the same language?!

<comment><USER10> Ruby is a language, not an environment. So why are you comparing Smalltalk environment to a language? (this applies largely to the original article as well - if you want to compare languages, compare languages; if you want to compare environments, compare environments).

There _are_ Ruby environments that provide fairly deep introspection and live changes to a system, like Pry. It's just not the main way of doing things. For a reason: It's not the way most developers are used to working.

<comment><USER17> You are asking to force the question into an artificially created box that doesn't help us get to the truth. The Smalltalk _experience_ is _naturally_ \- and more fairly - compared to Ruby as an _experience_.

They are both tools, and thus we're primarily concerned with their utility, not inherent value. One wants to know: how will these tools help me to achieve my goals. The answer is that the turtles-all-the-way-down experience of Smalltalk helps devs achieve those goals more quickly, easily, and joyfully.

p.s. Thanks for pointing out Pry! I didn't know about it and it looks really cool :) As it relates to this conversation though, a more-advanced repl is stone-age technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know a good iPhone programmer and he credits a lot to learning smalltalk before Objective C to make it a breeze, good to hear from Ruby folks as well! I'm definitely learning it soon!

</comment><comment><USER19> Okay, I'm sold. What books does HN recommend for learning Smalltalk effectively?

<comment><USER20> There's a great collection of free books at: <http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html>

I found the following particularly useful: 'Smalltalk by Example', by Alex Sharp; 'Smalltalk With Style', by Edward Klimas, Suzanne Skublics and David A Thomas.

This is a great book for beginners in any OO language: 'Smalltalk, Objects, and Design', by Chamond Liu

Also surprisingly useful (terse, but well structured): 'On To Smalltalk', by Patrick Henry Winston

Finally, there's the excellent ProfStef interactive tutorial that's included with Pharo ([http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/01/learn-smalltalk-with- profs...](http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/01/learn-smalltalk-with- profstef.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> SHUT THE FUCK UP I DONT WANNA LEARN THIS SHIT

<comment><USER22> You must be a hit at parties.

I know this, because you sure as hell aren't spending that time doing something useful and worthwhile.

EDIT: [REDACTED]

EDIT2: In hindsight, probably not nice to make fun of somebody's product. I know I wouldn't appreciate it.

<comment><USER23> Rails programmers insulting .net guys is sort of like two step children fighting. Except you're the red headed one.

<comment><USER22> Rails is a small hobby--day job is paying the bills with Java.

I mostly hack C and C++, graphics, games, containers, tests--take your pick, coffee and pistols for two at dawn. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AeroFS/S3: Private syncing to Amazon's Cloud made easy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aerofs.com/aerofss3-syncing-to-amazon-cloud-never-been-e

<comment><USER2> Been keeping an eye on AeroFS. I don't see why syncing and storage should be mixed together (Dropbox)...

I just want them to support syncing existing folders rather than blessing a particular folder as the syncing one. Then we've got a nice zero-config p2p replacement for rsync.

<comment><USER3> I too really like the idea of aerofs. It was pretty buggy when I first tried it (years ago, at least it feels that way). In the meantime I found spideroak, which can sync whatever directories you tell it to sync, there's no special "spideroak" directory that you have to use. It also encrypts everything locally with my key that they have no access too before sending my data to their servers. It does have to use their servers though, it isn't p2p like aerofs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been looking around the aerofs site for a few minutes now, but I haven't been able to get any details about pricing etc. My main question: how is this different from what JungleDisk has been offering for years? Besides the "unlimited" data promise (which should be immediate turn-off for anyone remotely serious about cloud storage), I don't see any advantage at all: JungleDisk has been

* in development for years, * is owned by Rackspace * but also offers storage in s3, * the abstraction over s3 is open source (atleast, that was the pitch when the company was starting up -- I haven't been able to find the link to the source in the new rackspace branded site) * also offers AES encryption and de-dup, * syncs files, * has apps on windows/mac/ios/android

... so what exactly is the pitch here?

<comment><USER5> I'm a cofounder at AeroFS. The main advantage of AeroFS is P2P file syncing without using servers. S3 support is a nice addition to the basic functionality, allowing users to use S3 as a "super" peer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't tried AeroFS yet but this new feature is giving me the push to try it now. Being in control of my data and my costs is something I was looking for.

Something is bugging me though, what is AeroFS' long term viability if they don't charge for their services?

<comment><USER7> I think they're a P2P, 'cloud' storage service. Space is shared by users (or that's what I understand). You can also choose to upload (some) stuff to their own servers. And everything with strong AES encryption.

I haven't tried it yet, I still stick to the old fashioned solutions (Dropbox, Backblaze, Time Machine) as they serve me well, but sounds like something interesting with uses to explore (…maybe not the very same ones that have current services!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems cool.

Hasn't AeroFS/Regular been in beta for years now? I like this idea but perhaps some focus on the core product so the company survives would suit them better.

Additionally - how do they emulate any kind of locking? Backup to s3 is easy but multi-device sync requires substantially more coordination that needs a lock of some variety.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder which key derivation function is used. In practice, this is probably more important for security against brute-forcing than choosing AES-256 vs. AES-128.

I hope they take some inspiration from the excellent tarsnap and use scrypt.

(PS: posting here because I refuse to register for yet another service or associate any social networking account with their site just to comment)

<comment><USER10> I'm an engineer at AeroFS, and yep, we use scrypt. The client applies scrypt with a per-user salt to the S3 encryption passphrase you enter at install- time, which gives a 512-bit key that the client stores. This is not quite the AES key itself - we apply PBKDF2 an additional time to this stored value to derive the actual 256-bit AES key (it fit more easily into our existing codebase...), but it retains the same hardness of derivation that scrypt provides (unless the stored key is stolen, as is the case in any system with stored keys).

In this manner, the AeroFS client can (and does) access the data stored on S3 directly, but if you were to lose the machine that runs the client (but still know the password you used at setup), you can still decrypt those files by deriving the same key on a different machine.

Colin Percival's writings ([1] in particular) were very helpful in picking the appropriate set of cryptographic primitives to use. Thanks, cperciva! :D

[1] - [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic- rig...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-right- answers.html)

(edited to add that I work at AeroFS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using AeoroFS for a while now, and its been incredible. I got to bed at ease knowing that Drew Houston isn't creeping over my files at night.

<comment><USER12> Second. I would love to be able to use 1Password with AeroFS instead of Dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd really like to try AeroFS although they don't seem to have enough beta spots. Is there anyone that could spare an invite?

<comment><USER14> Yeah I've been waiting to use AeroFS for years.. I don't understand why it would take so long for a product that has incredibly small marginal costs (unlike say, Dropbox or Gmail where there were/are real server storage costs involved).

They claim that if you invite 5-10 of your friends you can get an invite, but I don't want to invite 10 people just to be a beta user of the product, it's unfair to my friends to do so unless I'm a rabid evangelist who genuinely loves the product (which I'm not, yet).

You don't have to invite the backlog of users straight away, but try to invite say 5-10% of the beta-requested users every month (I don't mind giving 3 months warning for AeroFS to get its systems ready, so AT MOST by September/November it should begin this)

Every time I search around the web for AeroFS I see claims of it being vaporware but then there also always seems to be pro-AeroFS employees astroturfing. Even here, the CEO (not a regular user) is linking to a company blog-post (a practise which I don't necessarily have any against, but it's worth noting)

AeroFS can be so much - it fills an incredible important niche (like someone said in another comment - an easy to setup P2P rsync). Local, cross-computer syncing is an important thing - many places in the developed and developing world have limited internet bandwidth but heaps of local network bandwidth. Hundreds of gigabytes to multiple terabytes of media, documents and data need to be shared and Dropbox would require immense amounts of money to do so.

It may not be as profitable as Dropbox on a per-user basis, but it doesn't need to be since we are using our own bandwidth so it doesn't cost AeroFS anything.

They had YC-funding, have like 15-ish employees last I checked. With that, Dropbox arguable is in the process of changing the internet forever. AeroFS can do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any chance of opening up some more beta invites? I've been waiting awhile :(

<comment><USER15> Might help if I actually read the whole article, drop your requests here: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I got burned by AeroFS recently. Uninstalled AeroFS and then wiped one computer; when I woke another one up, all the data I had synced with the first computer started getting deleted, as indicated by many Growl notifications.

I could not stop the action and was only able to recover bits and pieces of data from deleted blocks. On OSX, one might think that deleted actions would move the file to the trash but, nope, straight up deleted. These two unexpected behaviors have convinced me drop AeroFS and stop telling others about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Tautologistics,

There's a good chance you won't ever see this response since the thread has aged off the front page, but I figured I'd respond to it anyway, just in case.

We've actually addressed this behavior in the beta release recently by introducing local revision history. Unfortunately we haven't exposed this through the UI yet, but if this happens again in the near future I'd be happy to help you recover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tried AeroFS for a while but in the end went with InSync GD and Google's cloud, though Google Drive works just as well. I use a TrueCrypt vault for personal stuff.

</comment><comment><USER18> Only for Linux? Any timeline for OS X and the other?</comment>


Facebook's Oculus Insight Technology - <AUTHOR> https://tech.fb.com/the-story-behind-oculus-insight-technology/ <comment><USER2> My wife and I recently bought an Oculus Quest. It is such a fine product. I worked in the field of high end VR in the 1990s, we use SGI reality engines, expensive motion platforms, haptics, etc. The cheap commodity priced Oculus Quest is so much better.

Off topic, but after years of being critical of FB, owning an Oculus device makes me look on FB more favorably. You could accuse me of lowering my standards, and that would be fair, but I appreciate the Oculus ecosystem.

The Star Wars Vader Immortal experience for the Quest is amazing. The Quest is a new product, and I look forward to seeing what new content is made for it.</comment>


Geekey – Ultimate Keyboard for Geeks - <AUTHOR> http://geekey.io <comment><AUTHOR> Bazinga! After a few months coding, we're really excited to launch Geekey today, an iOS custom keyboard just made for you, geeks, hackers, badass, cowboyz, nerds!

With our keyboard, you can easily write l337sp34k, upside-down or even binary. We made have tons of text effects and also added a great package of kaomojis. Everything is based on Unicode so it works in any mobile app, also supporting international layouts. You can look to our website video to see how it sounds. ∩m∩(‿)∩m∩

Being frequent readers (but contributors for 1st time), we would love to get your feedback. Feel free to 4sk us 4ny7h1ng!</comment>


North Korea: 'outbreak of war hours away' as Kim Jong-un plans US strike - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9961610/North-Korea-outbreak-of-war-hours-away-as-Kim-Jong-un-plans-US-strike.html

<comment><USER2> Well, if a nuke does land in Austin, I guess my YC s2013 app will be moot!

<comment><USER3> I hope this is not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> really.. the telegraph? Sparkzilla how come? isn't there a better resource?</comment>